7.—OF VARIOUS OTHER DIVERTING MATTERS CONNECTED WITH GRINDING.
From experience we are aware that the invention of the useful species of phrenotypics, alluded to in our last chapter, does not rest with the grinder alone. We once knew a medical student (and many even now at the London hospitals will recollect his name without mentioning it), who, when he was grinding for the Hall, being naturally of a melodious and harmonic disposition, conceived the idea of learning the whole of his practice of physic by setting a description of the diseases to music. He had a song of some hundred and twenty verses, which he called “The Poetry of Steggall’s Manual;” and this he put to the tune of the “Good Old Days of Adam and Eve.” We deeply lament that we cannot produce the whole of this lyrical pathological curiosity. Two verses, however, linger on our memory, and these we have written down, requesting that they may be said or sung to the air above-mentioned, and dedicating them to the gentlemen who are going up next Thursday evening. They relate to the symptoms, treatment, and causes of Hæmoptysis and Hæmatemesis; which terms respectively imply, for the benefit of the million unprofessional readers who weekly gasp for our fresh number, a spitting of blood from the lungs and a vomiting of ditto from the stomach. The song was composed of stanzas similar to those which follow, except the portion relating to Diseases of the Brain, which was more appropriately separated into the old English division of Fyttes.
HÆMOPTYSIS.
A sensation of weight and oppression at the chest, sirs;
With tickling at the larynx, which scarcely gives you rest, sirs;
Full hard pulse, salt taste, and tongue very white, sirs;
And blood brought up in coughing, of colour very bright, sirs.
It depends on causes three—the first’s exhalation;
The next a ruptured artery—the third, ulceration.
In treatment we may bleed, keep the patient cool and quiet,
Acid drinks, digitalis, and attend to a mild diet.
Sing hey, sing ho, we do not grieve
When this formidable illness takes its leave.
HÆMATEMESIS.
Clotted blood is thrown up, in colour very black, sirs,
And generally sudden, as it comes up in a crack, sirs.
It’s preceded at the stomach by a weighty sensation;
But nothing appears ruptured upon examination.
It differs from the last, by the particles thrown off, sirs,
Being denser, deeper-coloured, and without a bit of cough, sirs.
In plethoric habits bleed, and some acid draughts pour in, gents,
With Oleum Terebinthinæ (small doses) and astringents.
Sing hey, sing ho; if you think the lesion spacious,
The Acetate of Lead is found very efficacious.
Thus, in a few lines a great deal of valuable professional information is conveyed, at the same time that the tedium of much study is relieved by the harmony. If poetry is yet to be found in our hospitals—a queer place certainly for her to dwell, unless in her present feeble state the frequenters of Parnassus have subscribed to give her an in-patient’s ticket—we trust that some able hand will continue this subject for the benefit of medical students generally; for, we repeat, it is much to be regretted that no more of this valuable production remains to us than the portion which Punch has just immortalized, and set forth as an apt example for cheering the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. The gifted hand who arranged this might have turned Cooper’s First Lines of Surgery into a tragedy; Dr. Copeland’s Medical Dictionary into a domestic melodrama, with long intervals between the acts; and the Pharmacopoeia into a light one-act farce. It strikes us if the theatres could enter into an arrangement with the Borough Hospitals to supply an amputation every evening as the finishing coup to an act, it would draw immensely when other means failed to attract.
The last time we heard this poem was at an harmonic meeting of medical students, within twenty shells’ length of the —— School dissecting-room. It was truly delightful to see these young men snatching a few Anacreontic hours from their harassing professional occupations. At the time we heard it, the singer was slightly overcome by excitement and tight boots; and, at length, being prevailed upon to remove the obnoxious understandings, they were passed round the table to be admired, and eventually returned to their owner, filled with half-and-half, cigar-ashes, broken pipes, bread-crusts, and gin-and-water. This was a jocular pleasantry, which only the hilarious mind of a medical student could have conceived.
As the day of examination approaches, the economy of our friend undergoes a complete transformation, but in an inverse entomological progression—changing from the butterfly into the chrysalis. He is seldom seen at the hospitals, dividing the whole of his time between the grinder and his lodgings; taking innumerable notes at one place, and endeavouring to decipher them at the other. Those who have called upon him at this trying period have found him in an old shooting-jacket and slippers, seated at a table, and surrounded by every book that was ever written upon every medical subject that was ever discussed, all of which he appears to be reading at once—with little pieces of paper strewn all over the room, covered with strange hieroglyphics and extraordinary diagrams of chemical decompositions. His brain is just as full of temporary information as a bad egg is of sulphuretted hydrogen; and it is a fortunate provision of nature that the dura mater is of a tough fibrous texture—were it not for this safeguard, the whole mass would undoubtedly go off at once like a too tightly-rammed rocket. He is conscious of this himself, from the grinding information wherein he has been taught that the brain has three coverings, in the following order:—the dura mater, or Chesterfield overall; the tunica arachnoidea, or “dress coat of fine Saxony cloth;” and, in immediate contact, the pia mater, or five-and-sixpenny long cloth shirt with linen wristbands and fronts. This is a brilliant specimen of the helps to memory which the grinder affords, as splendid in its arrangement as the topographical methods of calling to mind the course of the large arteries, which define the abdominal aorta as Cheapside, its two common iliac branches, as Newgate-street and St. Paul’s Churchyard, and the medio sacralis given off between them, as Paternoster-row.
Time goes on, bringing the fated hour nearer and nearer; and the student’s assiduity knows no bounds. He reads his subjects over and over again, to keep them fresh in his memory, like little boys at school, who try to catch a last bird’s-eye glance of their book before they give it into the usher’s hands to say by heart. He now feels a deep interest in the statistics of the Hall, and is horrified at hearing that “nine men out of thirteen were sent back last Thursday!” The subjects, too, that they were rejected upon frighten him just as much. One was plucked upon his anatomy; another, because he could not tell the difference between a daisy and a chamomile; and a third, after “being in” three hours and a quarter, was sent back, for his inability to explain the process of making malt from barley,—an operation, whose final use he so well understands, although the preparation somewhat bothered him. And thus, funking at the rejection of a clever man, or marvelling at the success of an acknowledged fool—determining to take prussic acid in the event of being refused—reading fourteen hours a day—and keeping awake by the combined influence of snuff and coffee—the student finds his first ordeal approach.